With the “surge” policy in place, this was supposed to be a summer of political reconciliation. Instead, a variety of Iraqi politicians have spent their August recess plotting a “parliamentary coup” that would “oust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, declare a state of emergency and install a new government.”
At the forefront of these efforts is former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite who was Washington’s first choice to lead Iraq after the U.S. occupation authority ended. He now is being presented by his followers as the best hope of saving Iraq from what they say is certain catastrophe.
But Allawi’s is by no means the only name in circulation. Another former prime minister, two current vice presidents, a former planning minister, an Iraqi general from the old regime and an independent Sunni parliamentarian are among those being mentioned as potential alternatives.
“Everyone is desperate to be prime minister,” said Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni politician who has thrown his support behind Allawi but who has also been mentioned as a potential candidate. “Iraq is producing prime ministers.”
U.S. officials are not innocent bystanders in this process.
“There’s been a definite change in tone from Washington, and the momentum and drive to support Allawi will increase,” said Jaafar al-Taie, a political analyst involved in the new coalition’s campaign. “It’s not only that Maliki must go, but that the whole system must go.”
According to Allawi’s published program, the parliamentarians would not only appoint a new government but also suspend the new constitution, declare a state of emergency and make the restoration of security its priority. […]
“Even when Bush tried to modify what he said, he did not go so far,” said Izzat Shabandar, a strategist with the Allawi bloc. “We know that Bush from inside would like to replace Maliki, but he did not say it clearly. He chose to say it in a diplomatic way.”
As Digby put it, “It’s a public coup — Americans and Iraqis alike are all reading about it and talking about it like it’s a TV show and we’re all waiting to see the finale.”
Craig’s likely successor Jim Risch: Why couldn’t the folks in New Orleans get off their butts and fix things like we do in Idaho?
In most interviews and press conferences, the president seems almost allergic to contemplation. Bush avoids discussion of his legacy, his previous decisions, his place in history, even what he might do after his presidency ends.
Robert Draper, however, a former writer for Texas Monthly, spent hours with the president at the White House, getting Bush to open up on these subjects for an upcoming book, which Draper agreed to share with the New York Times. It led to an NYT piece today that is almost impossible to read without feeling incredibly frustrated.
On the subject of his life after the White House:
First, Mr. Bush said, “I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers.” With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, “I don’t know what my dad gets — it’s more than 50-75” thousand dollars a speech, and “Clinton’s making a lot of money.”
Then he said, “We’ll have a nice place in Dallas,” where he will be running what he called “a fantastic Freedom Institute” promoting democracy around the world. But he added, “I can just envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch.”
Bush sure is an impressive one, isn’t he?
This might have been the most maddening revelation:
Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.”
But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.
Let’s not brush past this too quickly. The disbanding of the Iraqi army was one of the biggest mistakes of an administration burdened by near-constant missteps, one that was largely responsible for the creation of an Iraqi insurgency. On the subject, Bush sounds like a confused child — he didn’t understand the decision, he’s not sure how the decision was made, and asked for his reaction to the decision, Bush is left to conclude, “Yeah, I can’t remember.”
Finally, there was this gem:
[Bush] said he saw his unpopularity as a natural result of his decision to pursue a strategy in which he believed. “I made a decision to lead,” he said, “One, it makes you unpopular; two, it makes people accuse you of unilateral arrogance, and that may be true. But the fundamental question is, is the world better off as a result of your leadership?”
Does Bush really want an answer to that “fundamental question”?
Let’s see, Sen. John Warner of Virginia is retiring, giving Democrats another key pick-up opportunity next year. Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho is resigning, and the DSCC is talking about making a serious run at that seat, too.
Looking ahead, Dems also appear to be in a good position to pick up seats in Colorado, New Hampshire, and Minnesota, with Maine, Oregon, New Mexico, Nebraska, and even Kentucky very much in play. Dems go into the cycle with a cyclical edge — the GOP has 22 seats to defend in 2008, the Dems have 12 — and the rest of the political landscape, at least at this early date, seems tilted in their direction.
And how are Republican insiders responding to this landscape? With dread and panic.
“It’s always darkest right before you get clobbered over the head with a pipe wrench. But then it actually does get darker,” said a GOP pollster who insisted on anonymity in order to speak candidly. […]
Republican campaign operatives are privately fretting about a political environment that could remain deadly for their party.
“About the only safe Republican Senate seats in ’08 are the ones that aren’t on the ballot,” a GOP operative with extensive experience in Senate races said. “I don’t see even the rosiest scenario where we don’t end up losing more seats.”
At least they’ve stopped looking at the political world through rose-colored glasses.
The Washington Post’s Dan Balz ponders seven key questions in the presidential race, and coming in at #6 is, “Do ideas matter in this election?”
Joe Lieberman aide Dan Gerstein comes up with the single most Broderesque response imaginable.
Dan Gerstein, a centrist Democrat and strategist, said: “The reality is both parties are brain-dead — they have no new big ideas to deal with the challenges we face today. Which is why I continue to believe that there is an opening for an independent, reform-oriented campaign to run against politics as usual and on a solutions-driven message.”
It’s hard to overstate how difficult it is to take this kind of analysis seriously. Listen to the standard stump speech of any of the leading Democratic presidential hopefuls, and you’ll be inundated with ideas — some of them big (healthcare, Iraq, an overhaul of U.S. foreign policy), some of them new (energy policy, combating global warming), and some of them old that haven’t gotten the attention they deserve (poverty, domestic security, education, trade, taxes). And it’s not just the politicians — progressive think tanks sympathetic to Democrats (Center for American Progress, among others) are teeming with detailed policy proposals on every issue under the sun.
I’ll gladly concede that the Republicans’ vision of the future is considerably thinner, and that the big, new ideas they are offering — war with Iran, privatizing Social Security, privatizing public schools — are awful. But for anyone to suggest that Dems are “brain-dead” is silly — they’re itching to implement a sweeping new policy agenda and are fighting for the power to implement it.
For that matter, this Unity08-like notion that a third party will swoop in to save us with a “solutions-driven message” is equally inane.
But just as importantly, Gerstein seems to buy into the notion that campaigns are driven by the power of big, new ideas. Way back in 2005, Jonathan Chait explained why this just isn’t the case.
The central assumption is that politics revolves around issues and ideas–rather than things like personality, tactics, and outside circumstances–and that the party that wins is the one that presents a more compelling vision of the future. […]
Alas, this sort of thinking assumes a wildly optimistic level of discernment by voters. Polls consistently show that large swaths of the voting public know very little about the positions taken by candidates. In 2000, the National Annenberg Election Survey found that just 57 percent of voters knew Al Gore was more liberal than Bush, 51 percent knew he was more supportive of gun control, and a mere 46 percent understood that he was more supportive of abortion rights. “The voting behavior literature, which is massive, shows that people are not particularly idea-driven,” explains Berkeley political scientist Nelson Polsby. “They don’t know what the fashions are, with respect to what ideas go with other ideas.”
Gerstein’s analysis seems custom made to please the editorial board of the Washington Post, but that doesn’t make it true.
As political scandals go, Sen. Larry Craig’s (R-Idaho) was incredibly efficient. The story broke late Monday; Craig resigned early Saturday. The start-to-finish timeline was almost impressive.
That is, if it is finished.
After his speech yesterday, a CNN correspondent asked Craig if he stood by his claim of innocence. “Absolutely,” he said, adding: “We’ll be fighting this like hell.”
At first blush, this sounded a bit like O.J. vowing to catch the real killer, but Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) indicated this morning he’d actually like to see Craig clear his name, withdraw his guilty plea — and stay in the Senate.
“I’d like to see Larry Craig go back to court, seek to withdraw his guilty plea and fight the case,” Senator Arlen Specter said on ‘Fox News Sunday’. Drawing on his earlier experience as District Attorney of Philadelphia, Specter said, “On the evidence Senator Craig wouldn’t be convicted of anything. And he’s got his life on the line and 27 years in the House and Senate, and I’d like to see him fight the case because I think he could be vindicated.”
Specter also said it was not too late for Craig to change the status of his resignation.
“He said he intends to resign. When you have a statement of intent to resign that intent could change,” he said. “And if he could change the underlying sense of the case, feel of the case.” … If he went to trial “he wouldn’t be convicted of anything. And if he went to court, was acquitted, all of this hullabaloo would have no basis.”
Sure, if we want to get technical about it, Craig did, in fact, say, “[I]t is my intent to resign from the Senate, effective September 30th,” which I suppose could suggest Craig has left himself a little wiggle room. And sure, I don’t doubt that Craig’s new legal team will do everything possible to get the senator’s plea changed and challenge the whole mess in court.
But as a practical, political matter, Specter’s vision of a Craig comeback seems more than a little far-fetched. The party turned on him, his constituents are glad to see him go, Idaho’s governor is already mulling his replacement, and the political world is ready to move on.
Yesterday was a period, not a comma. Craig’s done.
With Hillary Clinton now joining the pack, the top six Democratic candidates have pledged to shun rogue primary states. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Sunday Roundup.
Yesterday, Kevin Drum explained that independent of Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus has run a masterful, methodical p.r. campaign that effectively “outplayed” Democrats and other opponents of the president’s war policy. Atrios held lawmakers at least partially responsible, because they “have chosen to play along.”
But in order to really change the conventional wisdom, Petraeus needed a hand from a pliant press corps. Greg Sargent makes the case today that the media made Petraeus’ media blitz a success by buying into faulty assumptions.
…I think it’s necessary to add another explanation for the apparent success of Petraeus’ PR push: The media, in some cases out of incompetence and in others by design, helped him get away with it, and indeed actively enabled it.
If you step back and survey the totality of media’s performance this summer on the Iraq debate, it becomes a good deal clearer just how awful it’s all been — and just how complicit these failings were in helping to shift the debate.
It’s persuasive stuff; take a look.
As a rule, members of Congress try to avoid threatening their constituents, especially on tape. It’s one of the reasons a new controversy out of Denver is so bizarre. (via)
A local couple is complaining that U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn left them two threatening voice mails after they wrote a letter criticizing his fundraising.
Jonathan Bartha and Anna Bartha told The Denver Post that Lamborn said there would be “consequences” if they did not withdraw their letter.
“We felt very threatened and intimidated, and quite frankly, scared,” Anna Bartha said. “It was just not anything we would ever anticipate an elected official would pursue or a way that an elected official would conduct himself.”
Apparently, Jonathan Bartha, who works for James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, and his wife Anna, were disappointed when Lamborn voted against stricter dog-fighting laws. They wrote a letter to the editor, identifying themselves as conservative Republicans, and noting that Lamborn accepted campaign contributions from the gambling industry.
It prompted Lamborn to call the Barthas personally, leaving a message that said, “[T]here are consequences to this kind of thing, but I would like to work with you in a way that is best for everyone here concerned.” Shortly thereafter, Lamborn left another message in which he said, “I’d rather resolve this on a Scriptural level but if you are unwilling to do that I will be forced to take other steps, which I would rather not have to do.”
FEC records confirm Lamborn accepted the donations from the gambling industry, but the Colorado Republican apparently insists he returned the contributions. The Denver Post added, “He did not say when and The Post said there is no federal record of them being returned.”
One really has to wonder what on earth guys like Lamborn are thinking.